Wallet found in piano makes family's heart sing after 70 years

Saturday

A Hutchinson woman’s wallet turned up years later in a dilapidated honky-tonk piano in Mexico.

But the real story is what was inside the black leather wallet - a gift to Florence Holt in 1942 from her son Guy Holt Jr., who was serving in the Army Air Corps in Northern Africa that Christmas.

Perhaps because the wallet has been lost for about 70 years, grandson Tim Holt is holding tight to this family treasure.

A brief moment in Reno County

In 1979 Henry Martens, a German Mennonite from Chihuahua, Mexico, was in the Arlington area with a friend who was buying machinery. He noticed an upright piano in a building where they were buying equipment. His friend told him he could have the piano and Martens took it back to Mexico where he and his mother began stripping the wood.

Eventually, they discovered the wallet inside.

“It was hidden: nobody had seen it for years,” Henry said. “The piano had water damage and the wallet was worn, but everything in it was very good. There was no money. At the time I never thought I would go back to the states.”

Henry still wanted to someday return the wallet. He could tell by the documents the wallet had been inside the piano for decades.

Tossing the wallet in a box, Henry ended up moving to Alberta, Canada, where he met a woman named Joanne. They fell in love and married. Henry made Canada home. Six years passed before he discovered the wallet again in the bottom of the box.

“I was embarrassed; I had waited too long,” Henry said, sounding disappointed in himself. “I made all these stories up in my head.”

Henry thought he might return it. Then he didn’t.

Several more years passed by before Henry thought about the wallet again. The guilt returned. He really struggled with having Florence Holt’s wallet. After all, he had her driver’s license from 1942. He knew something about her - she was 5 feet, 4 inches, with gray eyes.

“All of a sudden I was going to burn it. End of story. I figured if I brought it back now the people would think I was stupid,” Henry said.

Then something told him not to burn the wallet. Joanne offered to help him find the owner.

Detective work

While Henry spent part of his time driving trucks between Canada and Texas, Joanne was skilled at working on the computer. She found Florence and Guy Holt and their three children in the 1940 Reno County Census.

“Then I prayed,” said Joanne Martens. “God showed me the next direction to take to find the family and I called the Hutchinson Public Library.”

That’s where Natasha Russell-Iverson, reference assistant, became involved. Sorting through the information Henry and Joanne shared, Russell-Iverson was able to search the obituaries at the Hutchinson News for Guy and Florence Holt and their descendants. She also checked with Ancestry.com.

“Luckily I found the grandson, Tim Holt, and he was the right one,” Russell- Iverson said. She had Googled Holt and found he had a real estate business in Wichita and provided the Martens with the number within a day. It’s what Russell-Iverson and the five people on library’s reference desk do for people on a daily basis, though she admits this was an unusual research request.

As far as the Martens are concerned, Russell-Iverson cracked the case which had been plaguing Henry with feelings of guilt for decades.

Message in the piano

The next day, Oct. 26, Tim Holt received a call at his office in Wichita. The women on the other end asked:

Was he related to Guy and Florence Holt of Hutchinson?

“I told them yes, they were my grandparents,” Tim Holt said. “She said she had something to give back to me, my grandmother’s wallet. Her husband had found it in a piano.”

That was shocking news. His grandmother had been dead since 1967.

The Martens spent $32.58 to mail the wallet to Tim.

Cautiously, as if opening a buried time capsule, he slowly removed one item at a time. There was a handwritten note from Tim’s father to his grandmother in Dec. 1942 – “Mother now you won’t have to tear your purse up when I ask you for $5.”

Items in the wallet were relevant to the time period, especially for a woman who had two sons serving in World War II.

There was her membership to the National Red Cross Volunteer Campaign, a $5 War Fund donation and her Mothers of World War II membership card.

Florence had saved a receipt from the post office for sending her son Lt. Bill Holt candy and a fruit cake, as well as another receipt for his subscription to the Hutchinson News-Herald.

There were even rare, wallet-sized family photos that surviving relatives had never seen, including one of Tim Holt as an infant in 1945.

“I left it just the way I found it,” Tim Holt said, stacking the photos in the very same order his grandmother had them. “It’s a treasure. A history of our family.”

“We never knew how short Mama Holt was,” he said. But they discovered that fact by studying her driver’s license preserved inside the genuine leather “Princess Gardner” wallet.

How it ended up in a piano in Arlington will remain a mystery.

“We think it was stolen, or lost,” Tim Holt said. “But I guess it was stolen because Mama Holt didn’t lose anything.”

They believe whoever stole the wallet did it between 1946 and 1947. They would have taken whatever money was in it and then tossed it in the piano, believed to have come from a bar in Hutchinson. There was a metal plate with the name of bar on the side of the piano, according to Martens. But Mama Holt would never have gone to a bar - more evidence the wallet was stolen.

Since sending the wallet to Holt, the Martens have stopped twice at a truck stop restaurant in Park City, along the Interstate between Canada and Texas, to visit.

“I’ve made a friend with Tim,” Martens said.

Meanwhile, Tim feels the Martens have given his entire family a gift.

“We had lost contact with Uncle Bill’s family,” Tim Holt said. “Somebody was telling me something. We needed to reconnect.”

His grandmother was the connector of their family, carrying around all the photos and receipts that linked her to her beloved children in her wallet.

“I use to tell my kids we can have best friends and best buddies, but in the end all we really have is family,” Tim said.

This was the message Mama Holt carried in her wallet.

It’s also perhaps why Martens told himself for years, “That wallet needed to go to family.”

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